


These Last Strands of Man

by flowercrownremus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Sirius Black Lives, Werewolf Draco
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-14 12:05:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4563999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowercrownremus/pseuds/flowercrownremus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Department of Mysteries, Sirius Black lives, Lucius Malfoy dies, and everything changes.</p>
<p>Draco, punished for his father's failure, is transformed by Fenrir Greyback into a werewolf, but Narcissa, rather than taking this as a lesson in obedience, abandons Voldemort's cause and turns to her sister Andromeda for help. As Draco struggles to adjust to his new life as a werewolf and a turncoat, he realizes that his only allies may be none other than his old professor, Remus Lupin, and (even worse) Harry Potter. Meanwhile, Sirius's near-death experience in the Department of Mysteries has brought with it side effects: the voices of the dead are calling to him from the other side, and they want something from him that he can't give.</p>
<p>[formerly titled: A Falling Light, A Fading Shadow]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man / In me." 
> 
> —Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Carrion Comfort"

A voice calls to him through the darkness of his dreams.

He knows it’s a dream because he’s been having it for weeks, the same dream every time he closes his eyes. A furious spark of red light — a shout and a cry and mad, sprawling laughter — and then the voices, whispers and murmurs that shiver inside his skull like grinding teeth, a thousand voices, a hundred thousand, the formless fingers of their words plucking at his skin, at his hair, pulling him down, down beneath fathomless white sands, streams of starlight flooding through celestial pores, all the bones of the world ground to silver dust and rising like a tide to swallow him. Every voice in this blinding infinity knows his name.

_Sirius_ , they say. _Sirius Black_.

_Sirius — wake up!_

He slits his eyes open against the night. It is either very early or very late, Grimmauld Place a still and silent and horrible thing in the blackness, and when he stretches his arm out beside him, the bed is empty. Of course. He remembers now. Remus left four days ago to treat with more werewolves: another of Dumbledore’s missions that Remus pretended not to dread. For Sirius’s sake, he’d put it off as long as he could, but with Sirius recovered and basically healthy and shouting at Kreacher just as heartily as he’d done before he nearly died in the Department of Mysteries, Remus had run out of excuses. “I should only be gone a few days,” he said, smoothing the fraying cuff of his robe as he dressed that morning. “They rarely want me to stay much longer. They’re frightened. They don’t want to take sides.”

Sirius knew he was supposed to say that it was fine, that he understood. He was supposed to let Remus leave him behind again in this house and act, at least, as if he didn’t mind. Instead the words pulled taut in his mouth and he sneered, “You don’t have to do everything Dumbledore tells you to.”

Remus only lifted an eyebrow. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

After breakfast, on his way out of Grimmauld Place, Remus paused in the doorway. The back of his hair was caught in his collar, and Sirius could see the spot on Remus’s shoulder where Remus had patched his cloak the Muggle way. “I’ll be back soon,” Remus said, and turned around. He smiled. “I promise.”

“I’ll be fine, Moony,” Sirius said. He felt guilty for his sharp tone earlier. “Half of the Order will be stomping through this blasted place every day. And I’ve always got Kreacher. Merlin knows he’s good company.”

“Kreacher is trying to get you killed.”

Sirius waved a hand. “Of course he is, but he hasn’t finished the job yet, has he?”

When Sirius reached up to brush Remus’s hair free from his collar, Remus leaned into the cradle of his fingertips, and when Sirius pressed one brief, hot kiss to his lips, and then another one, less brief this time, as he stood against the hard frame of the door, Remus didn’t stop him. “One for the road,” Sirius said with a wink, the same way he used to, before, at the start of summer holidays or during the last war, when missions might separate them for days, even weeks, at a time. _One for the road_ — it was a good luck charm. Back then, saying goodbye felt like tempting fate, and saying I love you felt like saying goodbye.

At the old words, however, a little divot had appeared between Remus’s eyebrows. His smile slipped away, somewhere Sirius couldn’t reach it. “Time to go,” he said, and then he’d stepped through the door, Disapparating with a _crack_ in the gray mist of morning.

In his dark bedroom, Sirius fumbles for the heavy glass at his nightstand and grimaces around the last splash at the bottom. There’ll be no more sleep for tonight, not with the voices in his head and the nightmares always biding their time, not with Remus away among the wolves. Not with Sirius’s spine creaking its usual protest, and some familiar acidic ache in his gut. He doesn’t think he’s really slept in weeks, not even all those days he’d spent scattering like light, tapering toward death. Especially not then.

The half-empty bottle of whisky sits on his dresser, because Remus isn’t here to know the difference, and when he stands to retrieve it, he catches the white shadow of himself in the mirror. Maybe I am a ghost, he thinks. Maybe I have been a ghost all these years.

More and more, these thoughts come at night.

He pours three fingers of whisky, splashing so that his hand slips around the tumbler before his grip tightens, and then he is climbing, climbing through the quietude of this hated, hateful house, through unchanged corridors and imperious stairwells up to his mother’s bedroom. He never could forget the way. So many stolen memories, a feast for the Dementors that he has fought so hard to recover, but every corner of Grimmauld Place still burns bright in his brain.

When he pushes the door open, Buckbeak’s head snaps up, fierce and predatory, but when he recognizes Sirius, he softens again, curling his head into his forepaws. “Sorry, old friend.” Sirius, taking up his usual spot at Buckbeak’s side, lays his free hand across the hippogriff’s back and waits, but Buckbeak only blinks one eye at him before falling back into a doze. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Sirius sips his drink and feels Buckbeak’s even breaths beneath his palm and decides that once the sun is up and he’s sober he’ll write to Harry. Dumbledore says that Harry must spend some time this summer with the Dursleys — Dumbledore says a lot of things — and Harry has agreed, but Sirius wants Harry to celebrate his sixteenth birthday with his real family, with him and Remus, and the Weasleys and Hermione. Even Buckbeak is more of a family to Harry than those Muggles have ever been. For at least one day, Harry should be allowed to forget about this war and the last one, forget about all the horrors he has seen, all the things and the people he’s lost. He should be allowed to be a sixteen-year-old boy, carefree as his father had been.

Oh, but Harry had not looked sixteen when Sirius last saw him. He’d barely seemed fifteen. He’d looked young, and small, and so tired, the exhaustion of Atlas, shoulders bent beneath a weight he could hardly bear. For the first time he reminded Sirius not of James or Lily, but of Remus, Remus at twelve or thirteen years old, scrawny, scarred, and burdened, already, by death or something worse.

They’d both been there, Harry and Remus, when Sirius woke in the Hogwarts Hospital Wing less than a week after his cousin Bellatrix had sent a Stunning spell to his chest and his cousin Tonks had caught him as he fell, dragging his unconscious body from where he’d half slipped through the tattered black veil that separated the living from the dead. Apparently no one had known if he’d survive. No one quite knew why he wasn’t dead already. When they were settled again at Grimmauld Place, Remus had explained, “No one’s ever come through the Veil, Sirius, not even if they were only halfway through it. That’s what Dumbledore says. You’re the only one.”

That day he awoke, though, all Sirius knew was that for the first time in ages, in years, it seemed, the voices had gone quiet. Instead, there was Remus, his eyes wide, his hand gripping the edge of Sirius’s bed. And there was Harry. His face broke open with a grin so bright Sirius couldn’t help but grin too. “Madam Pomfrey!” he called through the privacy screen. “He’s awake!”

But after Poppy Pomfrey conducted her examination, her brows furrowed and her lips pursed as her wand passed before Sirius’s eyes, Harry stepped back inside the privacy screen. “Remus is with Dumbledore,” he said, settling into his seat, and Sirius only had a chance to wonder when _Professor Lupin_ had become _Remus_ before he noticed that Harry’s once happy expression had turned inward, something complicated in how he held his mouth. “It’s my fault,” he said at last, his voice flat. “You almost died because of me.”

“Harry, it’s not your — ”

“It is. Hermione said it was a trap. I should’ve listened to her. I should’ve learned Occlumency like I was supposed to and I shouldn’t have trusted Kreacher and I should’ve remembered the gift you gave to me, the mirror — I remembered it after, but you were already … ”

“Harry — ”

Harry shook his head, but he didn’t say anything else for a long time. Sirius wished he could understand Harry as easily as he’d understood James, but at Harry’s age, James had been so simple: a perfect teenage boy, built of bright laughter and stupid daring and easy camaraderie, whose sardonic eyebrows and proud jaw never hid one secret, one fleeting emotion, from Sirius. Harry was different. Sirius saw that. Joy flooded like light from Harry’s green eyes, but other things got stuck, all his clumsy anger and unarticulated pain. This past year, Sirius tried to find the right things to say, about the death of that Diggory boy and the return of Voldemort, about what it is to fight a war so young, about nightmares — but Sirius didn’t know what to do about nightmares either, except survive them. All he could do was protect Harry, and love him.

“I don’t care if you rushed in. You were being brave. And, hey, it was a good excuse to get out of the house.” Sirius smiled a little. “You’re all right. Remus is all right. And your friends — Ron and Hermione and the lot of them? Everyone made it out of the fight?”

“But people got hurt. My friends. You.” He paused, glancing down at his feet, then said, “Lucius Malfoy died.”

Sirius snorted. “Never liked him anyway. Good riddance.”

But it seemed that was the wrong thing to say too, because Harry wouldn’t look at him. He kept running his thumb across a mark on the back of his right hand. “When you were asleep … ” Something dark and unfamiliar leaked out the edges of his words as he spoke. “Dumbledore told me that I have to kill Voldemort.” He lifted his head all at once, his green eyes blazing. “That’s what the prophecy says. Did you know?”

Sirius shook his head. “Dumbledore tells me as little as he tells you, Harry.” He was tired, his body heavy from its near-escape from death, but he reached across his bed to cover Harry’s hand with his own. He squeezed. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” That was the moment, the moment Sirius saw Remus, saw Atlas, saw a boy much too young for so hard a life.

“Then you must know,” Sirius said, remembering the voices in his dreams and the call of oblivion behind his eyes, the call he couldn’t answer, not now, not ever, “whatever happens, you aren’t alone. I’m with you no matter what. And I have no doubt Ron and Hermione will tell you the same thing, if they haven’t already.”

“I know,” Harry said, but he didn’t smile again until Remus returned, carrying three steaming mugs of hot chocolate that they drank together in the silence of the empty infirmary.

  

* * *

 

Some time before dawn, Sirius leans away from Buckbeak and returns to his bedroom, his bottle, the empty bed. Nothing’s changed about it since he ran away, decades ago. Is it any wonder he wakes up sometimes and forgets — is able, for a few brief moments, to forget — that James and Lily are dead, that Azkaban stole his youth, that Remus has become a man he fears he hardly knows? The ceiling of his bedroom towers above him just the same, bone white and always high enough to make him feel small, and even the stupid posters he stuck up to annoy his mother are still there on the walls. The room smells the same, maybe a bit dustier, old cigarette smoke and the spicy aftershave Sirius favored as a teenager, pungent enough that it lingers on in the thick fabric of the curtains.

He rubs his eyes, blinks away tears of exhaustion. Lack of sleep gives everything a blue tint, a slant as if he were seeing it in a mirror. Maybe he’ll try for a few minutes of rest before the day truly begins. He’s learned to survive on so little, but there’s an Order meeting tonight, and Sirius doesn’t want Molly Weasley frowning at him and trying to feed him soup, he doesn’t want Tonks asking him if he’s feeling all right, as if she’s responsible for him just because she saved him. He doesn’t want to give Dumbledore any more reasons to keep him locked up in Grimmauld Place.

So he curls on top of the dark duvet, his knees tucked up against his chest, his eyes squeezing shut, and then it’s easier to be Padfoot instead.

Simple things: the scent of Moony in the sheets, a bright scent like lemon, and the dim sound of London traffic somewhere not so far away. Warmth in his belly, warmth through his paws, and he snuffles deeper into the blankets, thinking of Harry and thinking of James, remembering the first time Harry patted Padfoot’s nose with his chubby hand while James laughed and laughed. The time he chased Lily around the boys’ dormitory and she’d gasped and giggled and demanded, “James! Where on earth did you get a dog!” and James had shrugged, still a little in awe of Lily’s newly extended friendship, and finally Peter had said, “Technically speaking, I think he belongs to Remus.”

_Rat_ , he thinks, curling his lip, but then, below him, a sound. A cry. “Sirius! Sirius, wake up!”

The dream again? But no, there’s no red light and no terrible laughter, and there is only one voice, calling again, “Are you there? I need to talk to you! _Sirius_!”

His mother’s portrait starts screaming.

When he’s through transforming he finds his teeth are still clenched in a canine growl. Adrenaline spikes through him. Something’s happened to Harry. Or something’s happened to Remus. They are hurt. Dead. Killed. Betrayed. Something has gone wrong.

His name echoes through the house once more and he realizes at once that it’s coming from the Floo.

“Damn,” he mutters. He’d forgotten.

After he’d returned to Grimmauld Place, weak but alive, he’d forbidden Kreacher from, among other things, answering the Floo, and Remus had charmed it to amplify sound that it could be heard throughout the house. No more tricks, no more treachery.

Sirius stumbles to his feet and bounds through corridors and down stairs with surprising grace, given that he is only mostly sober and some days is still more comfortable on four legs than on two. “Shut up, you hag!” he bellows at his mother’s portrait as he passes, wrenching the curtains closed again, before he at last lands in front of the fireplace, dropping down to a crouch before the flames. “What is it?” he asks. “What’s happened?”

Andromeda’s head is floating in the fire, her features more stark, more like Bellatrix’s, as the light flickers around her. “Sirius,” she greets, mouth set into a grim line. “I apologize for waking you.”

“Don’t care. Is it Harry? Has something happened?”

“It’s nothing like that. Harry’s fine, as far as I know. No, this is … it’s … delicate. I thought I should speak with you first, before I go to the rest of the Order.”

Sirius doesn’t know what to make of Andromeda’s uncharacteristic hesitation, or the uncomfortable slant of her eyebrows, but it gives him a bad feeling. “Tell me what’s going on, Andromeda.”

“It’s about our family,” she says finally, and Sirius’s stomach twists, the liquor gone cold and sour in his gut. What now? What more can his family take from him? What more could they want? Andromeda sighs and says, “I’m sorry, I am, but I couldn’t turn my back on her.”

All at once another burst of flames, another head in the fireplace — blonde hair and cold eyes and a face once beautiful transformed by grief.

“Please,” Narcissa says. The word is brittle on her lips, but she says it again, a little less jagged this time, “ _Please_. You have to help Draco. You have to help my son.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narcissa asks for help that Draco doesn't particularly want.

His mother sends him into the next room once people start arriving — first McGonagall, her mouth and her back both in very straight lines, then bloody Mad-Eye Moody, whose awful eye swiveled to Draco’s bandaged arm straight away — but the walls of Tonks House have not seen a silencing spell in a long time, and Draco can hear the rise and fall of their voices even locked inside this gaudy bedroom plastered with Weird Sisters posters and a life-size cut-out of the actress Augusta Jagger, who will not stop winking at him and laughing behind her tattooed hand. Everything smells faintly, horribly, of sage.

“Please,” Draco hears his mother say, before another voice cuts in. He stares down Augusta Jagger. He tries not to listen, if only because he hates to hear his mother plead; besides, he doesn't need to hear her words to know exactly what she is telling them, how she’s begging for their pity, bargaining for safety, explain all about the threat hidden in the Dark Lord’s thin smile, the blood splashed across Draco’s bedroom, black stains even the house elves couldn’t spell away, and of course all the secrets she will spill in order to protect Draco. 

But nobody here will help him and nobody here will help her either, he knows that much. Not this lot. He knows what they are capable of, even if she’s determined to forget.

While he listens, or doesn’t listen, to the rumble of McGonagall (“ … but of course we must consult Albus … ”) he peels back the edge of his bandage, already loose from constant attention, and rests the fingers of his right hand against the bite.

It’s ugly. Hideous. Ghastly, really, and he can’t stop looking at it. He’d thought his whole arm would come off, that night — the night that thing, that monster, bit him. He hadn’t even realized it was a full moon, and when he did, when he tried to run — 

He lets out a shaky breath.

Without the bandage, he can see the red spaces down his forearm where once there’d been flesh, the blackening scabs along bloody ravines scraped out by jagged, venomous teeth. Just below his elbow, dark holes, deep as caverns, mark that first, fatal bite. He presses the pads of his fingers down, rolls his nails into the edge of the wound until a shiver of pain spikes through his arm, and he thinks about the fact that his father is dead, and that soon he and his mother will be dead too. The Dark Lord won’t let them live, not now.

At least, he tells himself, he won’t have the chance to become a disgusting, stinking beast — the thought sends a weird quiver through his chest — but then he hears his mother call, “Draco, come out here please,” and he has to dash the tears from his eyes before he can stand.

When he appears before them, he looks around. Of all people, Arthur Weasley, red-haired and dull-faced, his robes tattered and patched, grimaces at him in some horrific attempt at sympathy. Draco scowls back. The pink-haired girl he knows to be his cousin — the one in whose room he and his mother have been forced to sleep — smiles and gives him a thumbs up. The girl’s mother, Andromeda, Draco’s blood traitor aunt, has her gaze riveted to her sister, sitting on the sofa beside her, and Narcissa even lets Andromeda hold her hand, their knuckles mirror shades of white.

“Mother,” he says, prepared to tell her what a mistake this has all been, but she lifts her eyes to him and they are so terrible and so sad that he closes his mouth.

“Mr. Malfoy,” McGonagall says at last. The light in this shack of a house is golden and warm, and with McGonagall addressing him in her five-points-from-Slytherin voice, he feels as if he’s back at Hogwarts, say, six weeks ago, when his father was still alive and his biggest annoyance was Potter’s little band of misfits. “As I suspect you know, we have been discussing the best means of keeping you and your mother safe from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his followers. Though Andromeda has offered to let you stay here, we fear Death Eaters will eventually look here if there's even a hint of your presence. It’s well-protected but it would be foolish to take such a chance. There is also the issue … ” She pauses, but doesn’t do him the disservice of showing any discomfort. “ … of your condition.”

Moody breaks in then, his craggy face set in a frown as he takes a swig from his flask. “You all know I don’t like this,” he says, his eye turning in its socket to stare straight at Draco, “but _that_ is no lie.”

Draco flinches, just a little, but he doesn’t think anyone notices. 

“Why would I lie?” Narcissa snarls. Moody just shrugs, his electric blue eye still fixed on Draco’s left arm.

McGonagall holds up a hand, and everyone, except Draco’s mother, seems to settle a little. Narcissa's shoulders are still tensed, a predator ready to pounce, ready to tear someone's throat out with her teeth — personally Draco is hoping it will be Mad-Eye Moody. He smirks a little.

Then McGonagall says, “Your mother has already agreed to temporarily move to a safe house we have in our network, where she will be fully debriefed and, I assure you, protected from anyone who might harm her,” and his thoughts crash to a halt. _She_ will be protected … ? And what, then, will become of him? 

McGonagall continues, “In exchange for her cooperation, we will move you into our safest location, where you will incidentally have the insight of another werewolf to help you as you make this transition. And ultimately we hope to see you return to Hogwarts in the fall, but only if we can ensure your safety. I’ll be speaking with Professor Dumbledore shortly about the best way to — ” She tilts her head down, a wrinkle appearing on her forehead, between her eyebrows. Her forehead already sports an impressive number of wrinkles, the toll of innumerable years of Hogwarts students causing her trouble, Draco supposes, so it's remarkable, in a way, that Draco notices the emergence of another one. “Mr. Malfoy?” she says, her tone grave.

“Yes?”

Draco finds that he’s sagged against the door frame where he’d been standing, and his stomach, already a bit turned-over from the leftover curry Andromeda had hastily reheated for lunch, has swooped down, down, almost into his bladder. He blinks the heat out of his eyes, two, three, four times, and, wrenching his gaze away from McGonagall's wrinkles, does not quite manage to look at Narcissa. He looks at her hands, clasped in her sister's. “Mother,” he says, “what is she talking about it?"”

“Draco — ”

“You’re letting them send me away?”

“I’m keeping you safe. That’s all I’ve been doing since — ” Her voice cracks in half, and lifts his eyes then, to her pale, pointed face, her jaw, clenched hard to keep from quavering, but she does not cry. Of course not. Draco hasn’t seen her cry once since his father died, but he can’t seem to stop. 

“Safe?” He laughs and catches his pink-haired cousin wincing at the sound of it — high-pitched and muted somehow, as if it came from behind a wall of glass or a thick enchantment. He swallows, hard. “You brought me to _these people_ to keep me safe? We should have gone to the Dark Lord, we should have asked for forgiveness.” 

“After he sent Greyback — ” 

“He’s the most powerful wizard in the world!” Draco drags the heel of his hand across his face. It comes away wet. Everyone in the room is averting their eyes, even Moody, both of his horrible eyes, but Draco is right, he knows he’s right. The Dark Lord had been trying to teach them a lesson, and they had refused to learn it. “He would’ve known how to fix this. How to cure it. Instead you turn to _them_?”

“Draco.” His mother is standing now, Andromeda’s hand forgotten, Narcissa’s gaze bright and hard as the jewels she often wore around her throat (but not now; she'd left them behind, along with everything else), and her arms are reaching out, reaching up, until she has stepped forward and pulled him into her embrace. Her fingers dig into his shoulders, claws but not claws, now he knows what claws feel like. He swallows a sob, swallows the scent of her as his nose touches her neck. Jasmine and incense and his father too. “Draco,” Narcissa murmurs into his ear. “I am keeping you safe, I swear. He would have never forgiven your father’s failure. He was just playing with us before he killed us, the way a cat does with a rat. Do you see? Do you understand?” 

McGonagall’s voice reaches him, and he hates her right now more than he has ever hated her. “Your mother has convinced us of the sincerity of her defection. I hope that you too can be trusted not to turn back to the Death Eaters.”

He rests his head from his mother’s shoulder, the luxurious sensation of her robes on his cheek, at once so fine and so familiar they remind him of nothing so much as Malfoy Manor, formal dinners as a child when his parents let him stay up late and tea in the summer when Lucius would arrive home early from work and press a kiss to Narcissa's cheek, another to the top of Draco's head, and at night when his mother would stroke his forehead and read him a story, the end of her sleeve, the intricate silver embroidery gleaming, constellations and sylphlike creatures and dragons, of course, always dragons, catching the warm light of her wand . . . Is this all that remains to him of his home? The shape of a dragon stitched into his mother's robes?

He lifts his head to glare at the pathetic troupe of soldiers assembled in his aunt's house, convinced they can possibly defeat the Dark Lord. Dumbledore is one thing, but Arthur Weasley, for Merlin’s sake! What kind of fighter could he make? Or some stupid girl with stupid hair barely older than him? What chance can they stand? He wants to tell them they are fools, but all he says, all he can say, is, “One of you killed my father.” He feels his mother go rigid in his arms. 

McGonagall’s lips tighten even further and Arthur Weasley pales so that the freckles stand out like dirt on his cheeks. His cousin’s hair fades to mousy brown. No one says a word.

Finally, with a sigh like an apology, his mother leans back, away from him, her hands reaching up to cup his face, her palms smooth and cold against his cheeks. Something shines in her eyes but she doesn’t let it fall. “We can’t go back, Draco. He’ll kill us both. Look what he’s already done to you.” She wipes her thumb across his cheekbone (still damp, or damp again, he doesn't know which) and says, “This is the only way.” 

The only way: a road that cannot lead anywhere but death. 

But he nods, and she pulls him into another hug. Very soft and very low in his ear, he hears his mother’s voice: “One day, I swear, we’ll have our revenge.”

 

* * *

 

They sleep two more nights in the childhood bedroom of his cousin, whose name, preposterously, is Nymphadora. More preposterous still, she is an Auror and a Metamorphmagus, and she keeps her hair that way on purpose.

Narcissa sleeps in fits and starts, kicking her feet, clenching her hand into her pillow.  All the lines of grief and horror that have appeared in her face since Draco’s attack melt away in her sleep, but the grief and the horror must remain. Draco, for his part, doesn’t sleep. He turns his face away from the winking eye of Augusta Jagger and grips the curved line of his bite in just the place he knows it hurts most. He has vowed not to cry anymore and fights against the pain.

In the morning, Andromeda’s husband makes tea and porridge and cuts up some kiwifruit and oranges onto a plate. Ted is a Mudblood but Draco’s mother calls him Muggleborn instead, and Draco discerns without being told that he is the source of Narcissa and Andromeda’s estrangement. When Ted hands Narcissa a teacup, or a little bowl of porridge that she will stir and stir and never eat, she says, “Thank you, Ted,” even smiling a little, faultlessly polite, and Andromeda’s grip on _The Daily Prophet_ eases.

For all that, Draco almost likes Ted. More than he likes Andromeda, certainly. Andromeda doesn’t care much for Draco either, except that he is her sister’s son, and as a rule she says very little to him. Ted is quiet around Draco too, but not as if he doesn’t know what to say. More like, he understands that Draco doesn’t want to deal with meaningless prattle from long-lost relatives, even if they’re supposedly saving Draco’s life. 

“More kiwifruit?” Ted asks on Draco’s last morning at Tonks House. Narcissa and Andromeda are in the other room, packing the trunks they will take to the safehouses. Ted holds up something furry and brown. “One left.” 

Draco nods and waits as Ted slices it into bright green coins. The fruit matches the kitchen, which has walls so violently green they make Draco think of Slytherin banners and Quidditch robes and all his ties but one left hanging in his wardrobe at Malfoy Manor. Of course, Andromeda was a Slytherin, once upon a time. And Ted? Narcissa never said.

Since it’s the last day, Draco breaks the usual silence and, giving in to his curiosity, asks, “What house were you in?” Ted seems surprised by the question, the knife in his hands stilling for a moment. Draco says, “Surely not Slytherin.”

“What, because I’m Muggleborn I can’t be in Slytherin?”

“Well — ” Draco honestly tries to think of something diplomatic to say, but then Ted laughs and finishes cutting the last few slices.

“I’m having you on. I was a Hufflepuff, happily so I might add.”

Draco pictures the Hufflepuffs he has known, imagines one of them winning over a Pureblood, a Black no less. Cedric Diggory could’ve done it, maybe, if he hadn’t died so stupidly — Draco had not actually been as unimpressed by the Hogwarts Champion as he'd pretended, and he could imagine some silly young Slytherin being taken in by Diggory's sharp cheekbones and his bright gray eyes — but Ted Tonks, with his big belly and his colorless face, could hardly have had Diggory’s looks, and decent company though he is, he’s not exactly what one would call charming.

Draco squints at Ted, trying to picture him several decades younger, before he gives up and says, “So how did a Black end up eloping with a Hufflepuff?” He can feel himself sneering and tries, for his mother's sake, to curb his expression into something a little less impolite.

Ted scratches a hand through his fair hair, then lifts it, palm up, in a who-knows sort of gesture. “How’s anyone end up eloping? We met. We fell in love.”

“But — ”

“You’ve never been in love,” Ted says, not a question. He sets the plate of sliced kiwifruit in front of Draco, his face and his eyes going soft and, in Draco’s opinion, sort of creepy. Draco works very hard to keep his own face neutral. “That’s all right, you’re young. But when I met Dromeda, I just knew, her family didn’t matter, whatever some evil wizard bastard thought definitely didn’t matter, I loved her and she loved me and being together was the easy part. It was trying to keep away that was too hard. We tried it. She tried to abide by her family’s wishes, and I tried to protect myself from getting my heart too broken, but we couldn’t do it.”

The fruit stings Draco’s mouth, a pleasant sort of tartness that allows him to grimace all he wants, and Ted and Draco lapse into a silence far easier than conversation. The truth is, Draco doesn’t understand any of what’s Ted told him, doesn’t understand how a person can just walk away from their family. His mother says that until four days ago, she hadn’t spoken to Andromeda in more than ten years. For what? Love. Too flimsy a word for such a betrayal.

A few minutes and several sour slices of kiwifruit later, Narcissa and Andromeda step through the doorway, appearing, for the first time, more alike than different. Draco can see it now that he's looking: though Draco's mother is fair-haired, delicate-boned, her eyebrows pale, almost-invisible arches and her mouth resting in a crooked smirk on the thin edge of contempt, while Andromeda is all dark hair and strong jaw, broad-shouldered and sturdy where Narcissa is thin and sharp, the sisters hold their shoulders in the same proud line; they both lift their chins in the same knowing way, as if hiding a secret no one else is clever enough to discover; and, as they stride into the kitchen, they regard each other with the same half-smile of imperfect happiness, the smile that means nothing lasts forever. Draco has seen that smile many times, ever since he learned to recognize it. He suspects his father never learned to recognize it, or the fears that it represents, and perhaps that was the cause of most of his parents' arguments over the years.

“Thank you,” his mother says. She sounds genuine.

Andromeda grasps her hand and squeezes, and then she turns away, pulling Ted with her out of the kitchen.

“Draco,” Narcissa says. “Someone’s coming to fetch you soon.”

Draco stares at his plate, now empty. It’s not that he can’t be away from his mother — he’s used to the separations, the months where all he has are her letters, written in emerald green ink and sealed with the family crest, the letter M bracketed by spindly dragons, the edges of the wings sharp and ridged in the wax. The motto is never quite legible on the seal, but he knows what it says: _Sanctimonia Vincet Semper._ Purity Will Always Conquer. 

Except purity did nothing to save his father. It won’t save him, it won’t save his mother. What worth does purity have if it can’t keep them alive?

“I will see you again soon, my love,” Narcissa says. She's kneeling beside Draco’s chair, and he hates to see her there, hates that this is how far she's been reduced. Once the mistress of a manor, now on her knees in her sister's ugly kitchen, in her sister's ugly house, alive only at the mercy of people she hates. She reaches up to smooth his hair. “That’s all that matters to me.”

It's not that he can't be away from her, but his father is dead and this _disease_ is inside him, and now she must go away too, go into hiding, trusting her enemies to protect her, while he — what? Gets locked away by Albus Dumbledore with some pathetic old werewolf who tries to tell him it’s okay, his life isn’t over?

He asks, “Where are they sending me, Mother?”

“Wherever my cousin Sirius is holed up.” He wonders if this means that Sirius Black of all people is a werewolf, but before he can consider it too deeply, Narcissa says, “I’ve made him promise to look after you. Well, _Andy’s_ made him promise to look after you, but he’ll listen to her.” She leans in and presses a kiss to Draco’s cheek. “I love you more than anything. You do know that?”

He nods, eyes stinging, and the words get stuck when he tries to say it back, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“Good. Now,” she adds, patting down the edge of Draco’s bandage, which has peeled up of its own accord, “stop picking at it. Just let it heal, Draco. That’s all you need to do.”

 

* * *

 

Exactly at eleven, Mad-Eye Moody (of _course_ it would be him) appears on the doorstep of Tonks House and tells them to say their goodbyes. Narcissa hugs Draco once more and Draco, perhaps unnerved by Moody's watchful eye, manages not to cry. Andromeda nods at Moody, stern-faced, while Ted pats Draco's shoulder and says, “You’re in good hands.”

At five past eleven, Moody levitates Draco’s trunk and cuffs him by the collar. “All right, laddie, time to go. We’ve dropped false trails to make it look like you’ve run off in search of some bogus lycanthropy cure in northern China and from there to Istanbul, so Death Eaters shouldn’t be looking too hard for you in England, but better cautious and alive, I say, than careless and dead. So stay close. Don’t wander off. If you've got a brain, use it.”

Just outside the anti-Apparation wards, Moody shoves a woolen hat over Draco’s pale hair despite the summer heat and casts a Disillusionment charm for good measure. “You do look like your father,” he mutters with a hostile little frown, and Draco can't help but remember when Moody — except, he reminds himself, it wasn't Moody, not really — sent him careening across the school grounds in the shivering body of a ferret, but the only expression he shows this Moody, the real Moody, is a grin, flashing his white teeth, his haughtiest laugh.

“Good,” he says, something savage in his voice, and pays no mind when Moody rolls his eyes, the bright blue one just a little faster than the brown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the enthusiastic response to Chapter 1!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus returns from his mission.

Not every pack of werewolves wants Remus to hunt and howl with them, breaking bones together beneath the white light of the full moon. Not every pack is vicious, furious, tempted by the violent freedom offered by Voldemort, where they may run wild through the Muggle world: half-breeds still, mongrels still, but unmuzzled. Remus has run with these sorts of packs, fought with them, teeth tearing and claws scraping, awaking at dawn naked and bloodied — his own blood, but not just his own — and has hated every moment spent in their cruel company, but most werewolves, he has found, are as he has been, solitary, itinerant, seeking out whatever temporary work at whatever paltry wage might keep them mostly fed, mostly housed, and suffering through each full moon in the Ministry’s cages, beneath the the observational eye of a half-dozen Beast Division workers with a license to put down any wolves deemed uncontrollable. 

(The laws have changed again: _All werewolves must report at an official Ministry Transformation Facility for their transformations. Exemptions may be provided at the discretion of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, if and only if a werewolf is able to provide_ _a written statement from an approved Wolfsbane potion supplier guaranteeing the afflicted individual’s continued access to and familiarity with the Wolfsbane potion;_ _testimony from a respectable witness on behalf of the afflicted individual’s character; and proof of a private domicile that meets Ministry regulations on safe and appropriate spaces for transformation. Furthermore, no werewolf may transform in the company of one or more other werewolves, with the exception of those who report to a Ministry Transformation Facility._ )

These solitary witches and wizards — more every month, with Fenrir Greyback and his pack running loose — do not want to talk to Remus, do not want any part in this war. He can’t blame them. And even those who, despite the laws, have formed packs for safety rather than for aggression, packs that remind him of a few happy years long ago, even they refuse to join the Order’s efforts. At best, they have vowed not to voluntarily take up Voldemort’s cause, but Remus has not succeeded in extracting more than a handful of those ramshackle promises, bound to buckle the moment Voldemort turns his attention their way.

He hasn’t succeeded, that is, until today.

At first the pack with whom he has spent the better of the past week had regarded Remus with great suspicion. A French group comprised entirely of women and children, they found Remus’s accent unbearable and his presence unsettling, but the leaders met with him out of courtesy and, despite his schoolboy French, engaged with his points more seriously, more fearlessly, than many other werewolves with whom he has treated. But now, the morning of Remus's departure, Aline, a sturdy gray-haired witch, has brought him the pack’s verdict. “I must confess,” she says, her voice roughened, he suspects, by too many moonrises spent screaming and too many nights spent howling, “even before you arrived we knew we could not sit by in complacence as this madman gathers his troops. I’m sure you you know there is a French resistance movement … ? But we have not been sure whether we would be welcome among them, or even safe. Here, it is not easy to be what we are, you know. Oh, they do not register us and cage us, as your Ministry does, but the people revile us, shun us from wizarding society. No laws prevent us from being hired, but still, do we keep a job once they learn the truth? Never. I am a peaceful woman but it isn’t so difficult to see why some like us may turn to this madman of yours: at least he wants our kind.”

“He’s not _my_ madman, I assure you,” Remus says, “and he doesn’t want us for anything but to be weapons. He sees us as just the same sort of monster — ”

Aline holds up her hand and Remus falls silent. Not only is she older than him by more than a decade, but she is the rare werewolf who has lived with this affliction longer than he has, from even a younger age than he has. She deserves his respect. She continues, “Yes. If he has his way, it would be very bad for our kind, even worse, I think, than now. We will not be free. We will be domesticated as pets and assassins for him and his followers. And what of the children or those to weak to be considered any good for such purposes?” They both listen for the same the thing: across campsite where the pack has made its home in a secluded patch of the Forêt de Rouvray, beneath the sprawling branches of the oaks, amongst the bright green ferns, the children take turns reading aloud from a guide to charms. Half a dozen children, ages nine to sixteen, holding between them three battered textbooks and only two wands, while the pack’s resident teacher, Marie-Helene, addresses them in a cheerful, steady tone.

“But of course I don’t need to ask," Aline says. "We both know. For them, at least, we must resist.”

Remus, listening as a boy slowly reads a dull passage about the most effective wand movements, thinks what a gift Albus Dumbledore gave him. And yet, even if he’d never been allowed to attend Hogwarts, this would not have been his fate either: so much love and so little fear. He can’t begrudge his parents their desperation to break him open and find the little boy, the human boy, he’d once been — they cut their veins and bled money, they wept money, they would’ve sacrificed anything, anything at all, to bring Remus back, the real Remus, the Remus who Remus can’t even remember anymore. It was love, in its way, but this love is the other kind, the kind that inspires teenage boys to become unregistered Animagis despite the danger, despite the rules, just so they could run with their friend on the full moon. The kind that inspires peaceful women to fight.

“Then,” Remus says, after waiting a moment to be certain Aline has finished speaking, “what have you decided?” He pauses, then asks, less formally, “Is there anything I or the Order can do to make it possible for you to fight back, if that’s what you want to do?”

She tears her eyes away from the children, frowning, her mouth bracketed in lines of worry. But she nods.

Before he leaves, Remus promises to look into the French resistance group — and any allies the Order has within the country — without giving away Aline’s pack’s position or safety. He furthermore promises that if the French would not have her, the Order will. “You won’t be treated as a weapon, and you won’t just be seen as a werewolf. I guarantee it. We can always use more soldiers, more guards, more safehouses … ”

She shakes his hand, her grip strong, calloused. “I would like that. We all would. But, Remus, are you not here with us because you are a werewolf? I hope that is not all your Order takes you for either.”

Remus casts one last glance over at the children, at the pack, the women cooking and teaching and singing together. He is surprised by the tug of longing in his stomach, like the pull of a Portkey, sending him home. Wherever that might be.

“No,” he tells Aline, just as he has told Sirius, just as he’s told the Order itself. “I do this because I want to. Because I want to reach out to people like me.”

For the first time, it is not wholly a lie.

* * *

When he returns to Grimmauld Place late that morning, thinking of Aline’s pack and the promises he has made, he can feel his own happiness, how he is almost alight with satisfaction, a sense of usefulness, of _purpose_ — almost like when he was teaching, when the students grinned with delight when they understood, when they succeeded — and as he pulls the heavy door closed behind him, he has already begun the methodical work of squashing that joy before Sirius can see it.

Remus has tried to explain to Dumbledore that they can’t keep Sirius here forever. Sirius feels useless, Sirius feels cooped up, Sirius needs freedom. He’s said it again and again, all year, that there must, there _must_ , be some other way. And every time, Dumbledore would say, “I am of course welcome to any suggestions,” and Remus would fall silent again.

After what happened in the Department of Mysteries, Remus had blamed Dumbledore. That Harry had been left so vulnerable to manipulation, so unprotected, that Sirius had been so cocky and careless — shouldn’t Dumbledore have known a way to prevent this from happening? Shouldn’t they all have seen this coming?

Remus, sitting at Sirius’s bedside, Harry a silent knot of anxious energy beside him, had felt it all closing in again, the war, the lies, the deaths, the same terrors in different guises. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed. The same things he lost already he will somehow lose again.

That’s the thing about loss: there’s the before and there’s the after. The after hollows you out, rips the stuffing right out of your stomach, but it remakes you too, fills you up again, this time with needles and shards of glass. Hurt built into your very design, familiar enough that you don’t always think about the scratches under your skin. But the before of loss, that’s a different hurt entirely. It is slow but ceaseless, it is the inexorable decline toward a horror so commonplace you cannot name it, though your skin is damp with its breath.

“He was reckless down there,” Remus had said to Dumbledore, his voice thin, seething. He’s ashamed now to think of it, ashamed to remember how his hands shook and his face grew hot, how his anger seeped out where anyone could see it. “He was reckless, because he’s spent thirteen years in a cage and you’ve locked him in the worst one yet. And you won’t let him out!”

Dumbledore peered at Remus over his glasses, his face serene, his mouth set but not reproving. “I understand, Remus, I do, and I am sorry that Sirius has passed such an unhappy year. But I know you want him safe, just as Harry does, just as I do. That has always been our aim, has it not?”

“Safe.” Remus spoke as if the word had gone sour in his mouth. “What good does safe do if he’s dying right now? If he were really safe, if locking him up in that house would keep him from ever — ” Remus broke off and turned his face away. He inhaled, exhaled, did not open his eyes. Did not think about Sirius in the Hospital Wing, Harry gripping his cold hand. Did not think about Sirius half-fallen through the Veil, half-disappeared into the realm of the dead, and himself frozen, able only to watch, numb, as Nymphadora caught him. “I apologize, Professor,” he said when his eyes focused again and found Dumbledore gazing patiently back at him. “It isn’t your fault. I know that. You aren’t the only one keeping him in that house.”

Dumbledore sighed. Sitting before him, Remus felt small and wretched. “You are far too young to have lost so much, Remus," Dumbledore said. "I wish it were not so. But it is understandable that you cling that much more tightly to what you have.”

And it’s true, isn’t it, that Remus hasn’t searched for some better alternative, some way Sirius might go free. Out of Grimmauld Place — and into what? He wants so much to keep Sirius, to save him, to carry him back through the years until he is that beautiful sixteen year old again, wedged in beside Remus in his dormitory bed, eyes sleepy, luminous smile gone quiet as he leans in to whisper something in Remus’s ear that leaves them both giddy, nervous, their young hearts already rearranging to accommodate the shape of one another’s affection. And maybe Remus, Remus as he is now, gray hair and bad joints and a twelve-year gap in his life like radio static, has been afraid that if Sirius steps into the world again, he will realize he’s not a teenager anymore, and neither is Remus, and whatever strange sad love they’ve built between them stands on nothing stronger than memories — memories that lose their shine if Remus thinks about how it all fell apart in the afterglow.

In the entryway, Remus hangs up his coat and slips as quietly past the portrait of Sirius’s mother as he can. He knows he ought to talk to Sirius soon about all this — he needs to remind Sirius that they can’t go back in time, that whatever they’ve been doing, it can’t undo anything else — but he needs to write his report first, and that might take all afternoon. 

Talking to Sirius can wait, he decides, as he always does, and he climbs the stairs up to the bedroom that is officially his to use. His clothes are all there, his papers and his quills. Duplicates of his reports, carefully labeled and filed. On full moons, when he’s not on a mission and Severus has provided Wolfsbane, this room is where he transforms. But he hasn’t slept in here more than a dozen times in all these months.

From the end of the corridor, however, he hears a sharp voice, definitely Sirius’s, saying, “…never agreed to this, and if he doesn't want to, then I'm not going to force him…” and then another voice, stern and feminine: “Mr. Black, that is hardly helping.”

He knows that voice. But what would Poppy Pomfrey be doing at Grimmauld Place, unless someone is hurt?

He drops his satchel onto his stale bed and hurries down the hall, his breath a little short, to find the room the sounds are coming from — one of the guest rooms, one of the ones the children slept in last summer. The door is ajar and, not bothering to knock, he pushes it wide open. Inside, he sees Sirius, looking quite the same as usual, still too pale and too thin, his cheekbones sharp beneath the glittering gray of his eyes, but no sign of injury or illness. Poppy Pomfrey, her lips pursed, has her wand out and is tucking sheets around the narrow bed against the wall with a few efficient flicks of her wrist, while Sirius leans back, arms crossed over his chest, watching.

“What’s this?” Remus asks.

Sirius turns, dropping his arms to his sides. “You're back,” he says brightly, and Madam Pomfrey glances over too. “Afraid we've got trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?” He offers a smile. “Hello, Poppy. Nice to see you.”

She returns his smile warmly; she has always been fond of him. “And you as well, Remus,” she says. “I see you and Mr. Black are bad influences on one another. Neither of you eating enough, I should think.”

Sirius makes a sound of disgust. “There’ll be plenty of time for scolding later. For now we unfortunately have to deal with my cousin.”

“Which cousin, Sirius? You have so many.”

His lip curls, just a hint of that Black superciliousness that, of course, comes out most often when discussing the Blacks themselves. “Narcissa.”

“Narcissa Malfoy?” Remus keeps the surprise out of his voice. “What’s happened?”

“She’s defected _._ ” Before Remus can react, he adds, “And she’s sending her brat to live with us.”

“ _Draco_? _”_

“For safekeeping,” Sirius confirms with an ironic twist of his mouth.

Draco Malfoy: an unpleasant, arrogant child, far from unintelligent, but malicious, a bully. Remus has not forgotten that business with Buckbeak, nor the way Draco tried — and failed — to use the Dementors’ effect on Harry against him. His boggart had assumed the form of a figure laughing at him, pointing and jeering, alternating between Draco’s Slytherin friends, his professors, his parents, and even Harry, before Riddikulus left them all in various states of undress and Remus had had to intervene.

“If you two are quite finished,” says Madam Pomfrey, prising open her large bag with such force that the potions within rattle. “Minerva has charged me with getting everything ready for him before he arrives. It should be any minute now, and I’ll have to perform an examination right away. I can’t do much, of course, but at least I ought to make certain the wound is healing properly. From what Minerva said he hasn’t even been taken to St. Mungo’s since — ” She shakes her head, then sends Sirius a shrewd look. “Well, you tell him or I will, there’s no sense keeping it secret.”

“Tell me what?”

"Fine." Sirius drops onto the bed, leaning back on the mattress, heedless of Madam Pomfrey’s efforts in making it. At Pomfrey’s harrumph of protest, he says, “It’s my house, my room, my sheets. The little bastard can handle it if they're a bit wrinkled,” and she returns, very grudgingly, to sorting through her potions and then, with a sudden sigh, runs bustling downstairs to determine whether the kitchen is as poorly stocked as she fears. Remus keeps his eyes on Sirius. Reclined on his elbows like that, Sirius looks almost young, and very handsome, glaring out at Remus from beneath his black hair; he looks like a Sirius Black who has not spent a third of his life in Azkaban, who didn’t almost die just weeks ago. 

“On the last full moon,” Sirius says, and Remus wishes all at once that he had somewhere to sit too, but there isn’t a single chair in this room, they’ve all been dragged down into the Order’s meeting room, “a werewolf bit Draco Malfoy.” He sits up a little, pushing the hair out of his face, and he doesn’t have to say the rest. Remus already knows.

“Greyback bit Draco.”

Sirius nods.

“Okay,” Remus says, and holds his hands still. The ache of it sharpens out of nowhere: the bite. His bite. Scar tissue nearly as old as he is. Touching it won't change anything, can't sooth a sting that isn't real. His hands are heavy, his fingers numb.

Draco Malfoy. He can’t be more than sixteen years old. A child still, whatever else he has been.

“Moony?”

Remus blinks up at Sirius, whom he finds watching him with a wary expression, his mouth set into a stern little frown. All the careless youth Remus had seen in his features has disappeared again. 

“I’m only thinking,” Remus assures him, and then, at Sirius’s eloquently arched eyebrow, he says, “The next full moon. It’s in two weeks.” He flexes his hands, once, twice, the skin across his fist feeling stretched out, papery thin. Whatever happiness he’d felt earlier in the day has leaked away, lost somewhere in the walls of Grimmauld Place. "July 30."

“July 30,” Sirius repeats. Unhappy. Surprised. He used to keep track of moons when they were young. He always knew.

“Yes,” Remus says, and does not wince at the bite's phantom pain. It's not really there. He knows that. He knows it does not really hurt. “I'm afraid that Draco Malfoy’s first full moon will be the day before Harry’s birthday.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So basically I never really understood what the hell Remus was doing during his missions but I thought it was stupid if he was just getting into fights with evil werewolf packs the whole time, it's basically just stupid that all werewolves except Remus are basically shown to be evil, and so I thought this made more sense. And if it doesn't, bear with me anyway and pretend it does. I'm just a girl trying to have some fun by writing all her favorite characters experiencing deep misery and emotional suffering.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for your patience with this update, and please note that chapter updates will now be happening every other Sunday, because I just got a new job and that fits better with my work schedule.


	4. Chapter 4

After a rather more complicated journey than seems strictly necessary, Moody deposits Draco and his lonely little trunk inside a dark house hidden on a Muggle street in London. 12 Grimmauld Place, if the scrap of paper Moody thrust at him is accurate: an overgrown townhouse with an entryway deep as a dragon’s mouth, everything washed in yellow-brown light by an ancient chandelier. The air tastes stale, too warm compared to the streets of London. Along each wall, the wallpaper peels away in wide strips as if straining to escape, and Draco can understand the impulse. What he wouldn’t give to be back at Malfoy Manor, or even at Tonks House, with the fresh fruit laid out at breakfast and his mother curled up beside him at night.

Draco frowns at Mad-Eye Moody, who has focused his attention — and both eyes — down the long, dark hallway. “Will you finally tell me where the hell I am,” Draco says, and Moody digs his fingers into Draco’s shoulder. “That _hurts_.”

“Quiet.”

“I will not be quiet! I’ve held my tongue all morning — ” Moody, finally glancing at him, snorts. “ — but I demand to be told where I am, and what you’re going to do with me, or I shall … I shall … ”

Moody’s grin is fearsome. “You shall … ? Come along, boy, before you wake her.” 

He uses his grip on Draco’s shoulder to steer him down the long hall, but Draco, shrugging him free, says, “Wake _who_?”

“Shut up, laddie — ”

Cold flames surge through Draco’s chest, and he finds his hands are shaking, and the hazy light above seems to blaze white for a moment before Draco blinks hard. “You listen, you ugly freak!” He schools his hands to stillness by clenching them at his sides. “I demand that you tell me where you have taken me! And tell me where my mother has gone! And tell me what you people plan to do with me now that — ”

Moody exhales, a flat sigh. “I _warned_ you,” he says, his blue eye flicking past Draco, down the dark of the hallway, and Draco feels on the minutest sense of apprehension before he looks behind him.

A woman screams. “BLOOD TRAITORS! SCUM! FILTH!” Draco presses his hands over his ears, and stumbles wildly back against Moody, who, rolling his eyes, pulls Draco aside and clomps toward the source of the horrible noise. A portrait, an old woman, her eyes mad and mean and familiar. “How _dare_ you enter this most ancient and noble house.” Her voice has dropped out of a bellow, but it is still curdling and much too loud. “The shame of it! A child of my flesh consorting with Mudbloods and disgusting half-breeds! I know what happens in these halls! I know what happens in the house of my forefathers!”

Moody has his wand aimed at the portrait, but someone else comes barreling down the hallway, a scowling man with long black hair and a handsome face made of sharp angles, and between the two of them, they force a set of curtains closed over the portrait. The shouting stops, though a faint mutter of _filth_ can still be heard. 

The men turn to face Draco.

“What was that?” he asks. He keeps his voice low this time.

“That was your great aunt Walburga Black,” says Moody with a grimace that makes his distaste apparent. “And, since you were so insistent to know, this is the ancestral home of the Black family.”

Draco allows himself to look at the other man. Sirius Black. It must be. He does not look quite like the photographs of him that ran in the _Prophet_ — he does not look _mad_ — but, washed and groomed, face shuttered, mouth pressed into an unreadable line, he does look like a Black.

“There’s tea in the kitchen,” Sirius Black says at last. “Welcome home.” 

His voice is very flat and very cold, and Draco finds that this, too, is familiar.

 

* * *

 

Moody begs off, grumbling something about the Ministry, and then, rather out of nowhere, Madam Pomfrey the Hogwarts matron appears in order to drag Malfoy up to some third-floor bedroom for an examination. Every last professor and staff member at Hogwarts must be in league with Dumbledore, down to Filch’s bloody cat probably — except for Professor Snape, of course. Malfoy makes a note of everyone he has seen and recognized so far. It may be useful information one day.

At Pomfrey’s direction, Draco sits on the edge of the bed while she waves her wand about and prods the bite several dozen times, before daubing some potion over the wound and carefully bandaging it anew, and just as Draco starts to wonder if the entire ordeal may at last be coming to end, she presses another bottle into his hands. “Drink this.”

“Oh, what’ll this do, cure me?” he sneers.

Her mouth thins. “It will enable that wound, Mr. Malfoy, to heal as it ought to have done many days ago. But you did not go to see a Healer — ”

“My mother — ”

“Your mother, I recall, is a very intelligent woman. But she is not, to my knowledge, a Healer. Werewolf bites are not to be trifled with, young man.” She straightens her shoulders and tucks her wand away. “Drink up, drink up.” She watches him swallow down the clear blue potion. It tastes clean, cooler than mint, and he licks his lips when it’s done. “Now, before I send you down to lunch, do you have any questions for me? Do you understand what this bite means for you?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“I’m sure I didn’t say you were. However, there are many myths and misconceptions around lycanthropy. I have known and treated more than one werewolf in my time, and I can tell you — ”

Draco pushes the empty bottle into her hands. “Is it a myth that once a month I will turn into a stinking monster?”

“Now, Mr. Malfoy … ”

“No? Then I’m confident I grasp the situation.”

Tugging his sleeve down over his forearm, Draco stands and pushes past her, out of the room, down the hallway and down the staircase and down into the bleak light of the entryway. His trunk has disappeared from where Moody had dropped it beside a hideous umbrella stand. If anything happens to his few good shirts, he will not be happy. At least his mother had the foresight to tell him to carry his money in his robes.

Creeping away from the hidden portrait of the madwoman — his mother’s aunt! — he moves toward the kitchen where Sirius Black had been leading him, before Madam Pomfrey whisked him off. He hasn’t heard her descend the stairs yet, so perhaps she has learned the virtue of keeping her nose out of his business.

With a sniff, he straightens his wrinkled sleeve and buttons it at the wrist.

At last he finds the kitchen, after peeking into a few ominous doors, but he hesitates outside the doorway, listening. There’s a heavy silence, broken only by a wet rumble, probably from a kettle, and the sound of dishes clattering carelessly together.

“It’s fine.” Very quiet. “Really.”

Then, that cold voice that Draco knows belongs to Sirius Black: “He should’ve asked you. I let Andromeda blackmail me into a promise, but that doesn’t mean you have to — ”

“It’s fine.”

A snort. “You already have your missions. Now Dumbledore expects you to, what — ”

“Sirius.” The voice grows a bit stern. “I don’t want to fight about this. It’s fine. It’s … ” The kettle, beginning to whistle, drowns out whatever he says next, but then Draco hears him again, over the sound of pouring water. “Imagine how frightened he must be.”

“You were a lot younger than him when — ”

“Still.”

Draco isn’t stupid. They are talking about him. They’re talking about what a child he is, how scared he is of Greyback and of himself. They’re talking about what a burden it is to have to take him in.

Well, Draco doesn’t want to be here anyway, and he’ll tell them that himself.

Then Sirius Black says, “What about Harry?” and Draco freezes.

The other man huffs a laugh, but there’s no real humor in it. Draco swallows, and leans a little closer. “Have you written to him yet? I doubt he’ll mind if I don’t join in the festivities — ”

“And Malfoy?”

Draco’s heart drums uneven beats in his chest. “It’s his first full moon,” he hears the other man, the werewolf, say. “He won’t make it out of bed. It won’t be a perfect birthday party, but … ” A sigh. “Harry loves you, Sirius. Whatever you do, he’ll love it. But you’ve got to write him and Hermione and the Weasleys soon. And you’d better check with Dumbledore too, to make sure that — Sirius, are you all right?”

A teacup kisses a saucer with a loud ring as the werewolf makes a cry of alarm, and Draco can’t help leaning around the corner to look, just as Sirius Black shakes his head and says, “It’s okay. It’s nothing, Moony. Just a bit of a headache.” 

Black has gone very pale, and he presses the pads of his fingers against his eyelids, but he blinks his eyes open again a moment later — and, in that moment, registers the sight of Draco. His face settles back into a cold mask.

“Remus. Our houseguest has arrived.”

Remus?

At last Draco recognizes the shabby man at Sirius Black’s side: hair gone even grayer, clothes just as patched and worn. The same insipid, friendly smile. His old Defense professor, Remus Lupin. The werewolf.

“You?” Draco scoffs. “You _must_ be joking.”

“Afraid not,” Lupin says, still smiling. “Tea?”

 

* * *

 

“I can’t imagine what insight I’m supposed to glean from _you_ ,” Draco says, sipping his tea and eyeing the plate of biscuits on the table. When Lupin pushes the plate closer, however, Draco pretends not to have noticed.

He supposes he should be grateful that Lupin sent Sirius Black away to check on Madam Pomfrey, given that Black is a murderer and a blood traitor who is Draco’s own blood. He has no reason to treat Draco with much warmth. But despite himself, Draco finds Black fascinating: an exiled scion of the Black family, a violent criminal who escaped from Azkaban, and the apparently beloved godfather of Harry Potter. 

Remus Lupin, on the other hand, is just depressing.

Oh, Draco knows his whole story, saw it all in the papers after the furor of his dismissal from Hogwarts: poor pathetic werewolf, allowed into Hogwarts as a student on the whim of Albus Dumbledore, spent the years after the war failing to contribute much of anything to society, and then allowed, once more, into Hogwarts, this time to teach, when, big surprise, the werewolf did as werewolves do, rampaging across the campus one full moon night, nearly killing students and faculty alike. Parents were outraged, the Board of Governors was outraged, the Ministry was outraged. Draco’s father had explained to him how all that outrage would allow those who understood the importance of purity to push through more legislation to restrict the rights of half-breeds even further.

“Dumbledore is more of a fool than I thought,” Lucius had said to Draco the summer after Remus Lupin was sacked. “Letting a disgusting creature like that into the school — letting him near the children. Dumbledore can’t afford to keep making so many blunders.”

Draco watches Lupin now, searching for signs of what he really is. The truth is, he never suspected. That whole year Lupin taught, Draco had found him irritating and pitiful, a professor dressed barely better than a Weasley, and of course it was clear that Lupin played favorites with Harry Potter, who somehow charmed half the school with his stupid scar and his stupid grin and his stupid ability to catch a stupid snitch. But Draco had not looked at his run-down teacher with his dark circles and his fragile health and thought _Dark Creature_.

Even now, knowing what he knows, the most evidence he can find is a long-faded scar peeking out from Lupin’s collar, and a certain wariness he feels within himself — a sense of recognition, perhaps, of identification. Do werewolves know other werewolves on sight?

He supposes this is the sort of thing he is meant to ask Lupin. He swallows another mouthful of cooling tea instead.

At last, Lupin, brushing away the crumbs of a biscuit he’s just eaten, fixes Draco with a less easy look. “The full moon is July 30 this month.”

Draco nods. He knows this — his mother told him. 

“Do you know what Wolfsbane potion is?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I seem to recall you always did well in Potions.” Lupin’s once again offers a biscuit. “Please, have one before I eat them all myself, which will annoy Poppy terribly since she made them for you.” He shakes the plate a little and sets it down again. “Suit yourself. In any case, Wolfsbane didn’t exist when I was bitten, but it really does make things much, much easier. You don’t lose yourself. You remain sane, your mind in the body of the wolf.”

“Isn’t Wolfsbane … expensive?” Draco asks, flicking his eyes over the tragic state of Lupin’s cuffs.

“Yes,” Remus says. “Very. It’s incredibly difficult to come by, and, ironically, the more werewolves there are, the more restrictions the Ministry places on Wolfsbane sales. Sellers must be approved by the Ministry, and only a handful are, so they can set the price as high as they want. It’s a very difficult potion to make, but it’s not so difficult that it warrants those prices. Moreover, only werewolves listed on the registry are legally allowed to purchase Wolfsbane. There are of course black market sellers, but in those cases — ”

“It’s even more expensive?” Draco isn’t unfamiliar with how the black market works.

“And the quality of the potion can’t be assured. So any werewolf who hasn’t registered with the Ministry, or isn’t up to date on their registration, has rather limited options.”

“The — ?” Catching himself, Draco cuts himself off, and fiddles with the handle of his teacup. He refuses to play into Lupin’s hand.

But Lupin seems to know just what he wanted to ask. “I’m on the Registry, but I haven’t been up to date with it since I left my post at Hogwarts. I am no longer in good standing. You, I believe, are not on the Registry at all. I suspect that’s why your mother didn’t allow you to go to St. Mungo’s. They would be legally obligated to notify the Ministry of your existence.”

But if he’s not on the Registry, then how will Draco get his hands on Wolfsbane? And if the Wolfsbane keeps you sane, then what happens without it?

He watched Fenrir Greyback transform. He watched every bone in his body break, watched his muscles tear and his ligaments snap. Watched as some new _thing_ formed itself from the carnage of Greyback’s carcass. He has never seen anything more sickening.

“Listen to me, Draco,” Lupin says, much too gentle, and Draco, blinking, turns away. “Your mother did a very brave thing. Right now, to be on the Registry … you wouldn’t be allowed to go back to Hogwarts. You’d be expected to check in with Ministry workers every month. Anyone could find you. Voldemort could find you. You would be on a list that almost anybody can access. This way, no one knows about you, and no one has to know, until you’re ready to tell them.”

Draco means to tell Lupin to shut up, to tell him not to talk about his mother, to tell him not to use the Dark Lord’s name. Instead he says, “Will you tell Potter?”

The surprise is clear in the rise of Lupin’s eyebrows, the parting of his lips, but he covers it with remarkable speed. Sirius Black is not the only one in this house capable of masking his emotions, then.

Carefully, Lupin says, “It will be hard to hide the fact of your living here from anyone who comes to this house. Harry is likely to be among them.”

“So much for telling only who I want to tell when I want to tell them.”

“ _But_ ,” Lupin continues, overriding the venom of Draco’s words, “I won’t tell him or anyone else the details of your stay here. I will talk to Sirius and see that he keeps quiet too.” He’s the one who looks away now, down into the dregs of tea in his cup. He reminds Draco of something broken: a snapped branch, a cracked mirror. A patched cloak. 

“I do understand the importance of secrets,” Lupin says.

Draco doesn’t say thank you. He just reaches for a biscuit and swallows it down in three bites.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Maybe he hasn’t realized that Draco’s a traitor too now. Or a werewolf.”
> 
> “Narcissa’s a traitor. Draco’s just — ”
> 
> “A child?”
> 
> Sirius snorts. “Baggage.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title change! But it's still the same story and please feel free to continue referring to it as my "silly werewolf Draco fic."

The next day, Draco does not come down for breakfast, or for lunch, and it’s not until half past seven that Sirius catches him absconding from the kitchen with a stale baguette and a jar of blackcurrant preserves. “We put stew on,” Sirius says. “You can help yourself if you’d like.”

Two bright blotches of pink appear on Draco’s cheeks. “I think not.” He scurries up the staircase, the baguette wedged under his arm.

That night, Remus says, “There must be something we can do.” He’s changing for the night, and with his jumper halfway over his head, Sirius can see the skinny length of his scarred body. Maybe Pomfrey was right. Maybe they ought to guard each other a little more carefully. He imagines the bones of Remus’s body, broken too many times and sharp beneath his skin — he imagines the slight give of his stomach beneath the cliff of his ribcage, imagines the jagged line of his spine. Sirius imagines fitting their skeletons together, a ghastly jigsaw. It didn’t used to be this way. They didn’t always have so many ghosts sleeping between them, all of them whispering right in Sirius’s ear.

He strips quickly and pulls on a dressing gown over his own thin frame, fastening the belt with a loose knot. “About Draco?”

Remus hums a yes.

“It’s not as if we’ll let him starve. I’ve told Kreacher to bring him three hot meals a day if he can’t be bothered to come downstairs, and do you know, Kreacher didn’t even complain about it. Practically thrilled to be serving a _true_ son of the Black family.”

“Maybe he hasn’t realized that Draco’s a traitor too now. Or a werewolf.”

“Narcissa’s a traitor. Draco’s just — ”

“A child?”

Sirius snorts. “Baggage.”

Remus flicks his wand and the lights wink out. 

In bed they playact at some long-ago feeling, warm hands, warm mouths, and for a moment it’s as if he can touch it, the past, as if he holds it as surely as he holds Remus, and then — a burst of lightning splintering his consciousness — the voices screaming for him to _LISTEN_ — and, like that, the moment is gone. The past disappears again somewhere beyond the horizon. Remus stretches, turns away, curls into himself on his side. Sirius digs the heels of his hands into his eyes and tries, tries so hard, to block out everything but the sound of Remus’s slowing breath.

But the voices are everywhere and they demand to know, _Why are you still alive?_

 _You should be dead_ , they say, _you should have died. A thousand times over now you should have died._

 _You should have died in my womb._ It sounds like his mother. 

 _You should have died instead of me._ It sounds like his brother.

 _You should have died._ This voice burns through Sirius like the Cruciatus curse. _You should have died for how you failed me. Why aren’t you dead?_

Sirius clutches at his throat and does not cry out: James.

* * *

In the week that follows there are Order meetings and Molly Weasley’s home-cooked meals and Tonks’s grim and futile determination to convince Draco to open his door for her, and Remus writes long letters to werewolves, and Sirius writes short letters to Harry, and Kreacher carries Draco’s meal tray up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs every day. “How is Mr. Malfoy?” asks McGonagall one evening after yet another meeting to which Dumbledore has not bothered to turn up. At least he’s responded to Sirius’s letter about Harry’s birthday — more of a notice than a request — but his absence from Grimmauld Place is conspicuous. Sirius doesn’t like it.

“Draco is … ” Remus lowers his voice. A handful of Order members are still clustered around the far end of the meeting room, asking after each other’s spouses and children and projects at work, as if moments before they hadn’t been planning a war. “It’s quite a lot, all at once. Not only the bite, though that’s bad enough, but being separated from his mother ... ”

McGonagall doesn't tense at the implicit accusation, but, folding her hands together atop the table, she frowns. “It _was_ necessary. Narcissa Malfoy very likely knows a great deal about You-Know-Who’s day-to-day activities, and without some degree of leverage, we can’t be certain she’s told us all she knows.”

“Leverage.”

Remus sounds unimpressed, but Sirius thinks she’s got the right idea. Narcissa always was a good liar. As children playing cards or pulling pranks it meant you wanted her on your side; in war it means never taking your eyes off of her.

He says, “I just wish babysitting the leverage didn’t fall to Uncle Sirius.”

McGonagall regards Sirius with that same look she used to give him when he was a boy, disapproval masking a spark of amusement, before her stern brow unbends and her softening eyes slide back to Remus. “I assure you,” she says, “the separation is for their safety as well. And it’s only temporary. With Narcissa’s loyalty uncertain, we couldn’t possibly allow her to stay here, and surely you can see why giving Draco the benefit of your experience, Remus — ”

“Yes, yes, the benefit of my experience. Not much good to him, though, if he won’t open his door to anyone but Kreacher. I don’t think he’s left his room since that first day.”

Not quite true. Some nights when sleep eludes Sirius and he creeps from his bed with a head dizzy with too many ricocheting souls, he has caught Draco wandering the halls of Grimmauld Place, appraising the portraits as if searching for someone he recognizes, glaring down the mounted heads of house elves, poking his nose into every room he comes across. “Careful,” Sirius warned two nights ago, when he spotted Draco in the corridor just off the kitchen. He stood before a clock twice his height, prodding its innards with his wand. The clock, imposing as a cathedral, had originally belonged to Sirius’s great great grandfather, a notoriously sadistic old bastard, but it was a thing of unusual beauty in Sirius’s house of horrors.

At Sirius’s voice, Draco had wheeled around. The boy really was beginning to look ill. A few locks of pale hair fell across his damp forehead, and purple circles bruised the skin beneath his eyes, very dark in his white face.

Sirius held up a pacifying hand before the boy shouted the house awake. “It’s all right. It’s only, I can’t swear I’ve gotten rid of every nasty surprise the Blacks like to leave behind. That’s all. I’ve no doubt Malfoy Manor is much the same. Explore at your own peril.” 

“You know _nothing_ about my home,” Draco said, but he withdrew his wand from the clock rather hastily. Then, turning his nose up — how very like his mother — he stalked away.

Once he’d retreated, the stairs creaking beneath his hurried feet, Sirius had gone over the clock with his own wand and found no evidence that Draco had done anything to it, or that it had done anything to him, for that matter. Still, he cast a security charm on it. If Draco returned, he would not be able to pry the door open with force, and Sirius doubted that any sixteen-year-old save perhaps Hermione would have much luck breaking through his spellwork. 

Sirius hasn’t told Remus about these nights. He’d have to explain his own insomnia, and he’d just be giving Remus more reasons to worry about the child who fell unwanted into their hands. Whatever Draco is up to, whatever jailbreak he’s undoubtedly planning, he won’t succeed. Sirius is familiar enough with cages to know how to build one.

“The brat will come around, Moony,” is all Sirius says now, and Remus, elbows on the long dining table, chin propped up on his fist, sighs.

They watch the last lingering Order members clasp shoulders, trade jokes, and finally catch the scent of whatever Molly’s put on for supper. Watching them leave the room, he wonders how many of them will survive. He suspects that Remus, warm and solemn at his side, is wondering the same.

Finally Remus, leaning across the table to McGonagall, says in a flat voice, “I think he must be mourning his father too. It’s only a month now since Lucius died. Since the Department of Mysteries.” 

Not the longest month of Sirius’s life — that honor goes to those first months of Azkaban, of Dementors feasting on him until all he could see or feel or dream was James and Lily, dead, _dead_ , her hair a copper gleam in the rubble, his mouth that spent so many years laughing bent into a grimace of fear. James died knowing that he couldn’t save the woman he’d devoted his whole life to loving; he died knowing he couldn’t protect his son, who meant everything. He died knowing his friend had betrayed him, the spineless, soulless coward, and that Sirius, his _brother_ , who would’ve, who should’ve, died in his place, he had been the one who let it happen. And there was Harry, a miracle, alive in Hagrid’s arms, and Sirius had just let him go, stolen away to Dumbledore’s feeble protection. Mistakes upon mistakes, every one of them an impossible weight hung round his neck. That first month in Azkaban lasted a thousand years.

But this month has not been so easy either, not for him, and not, he supposes, for Draco. Indeed, it has likely been the very worst month of Draco Malfoy’s entire life.

“All right.”

“All right?” Remus lifts an eyebrow.

He’d never known how to read Remus, whose guarded expressions and easy smiles once sent him into raptures of anxious and eager affection and, later, into paranoid spirals of doubt, but these days there are times when he startles himself by knowing just what Remus means. It’s not a memory, not some interpretive trick he’d forgotten in the intervening years of hell. It’s something new. Something he’s learned.

At this moment, he knows exactly what Remus is asking, and he answers, “I said all right. We’ll help the little bully. One way or another.”

Remus’s smile slips. Another thing Sirius has learned: it startles Remus too, when Sirius understands him so well. It startles him, and part of him doesn’t care for it at all.

“Yes, well,” says McGonagall, rising from her seat. “I do not doubt Mr. Malfoy is in good hands. Albus and I have already begun to discuss the matter of his security upon his return to Hogwarts but I’m afraid we don’t have any answers yet.” 

Remus says, “But Hogwarts is the safest place in the world.”

“Even so, if it becomes widely known that Mr. Malfoy is alive and well in Britain, rather than fled to some far corner of the earth, he may very well become a target.” 

“No more than Harry is.”

McGonagall hesitates. “It’s a delicate situation. Our fear is not an invasion from outside Hogwarts, but that some of the students of Slytherin may take matters into their own hands. There is powerful magic in place to protect students in their Houses, but it cannot prevent every act of violence. And then there is the matter of concealing his condition. We will find a solution, I am certain, but until we do … Draco must stay with you.” 

Delightful.

“And now I must be on my way — no, no, I can’t stay for dinner, I do have a life of my own you know.” She’s fixed him with a sharp green glare before he gets a word out. “Laugh all you want, Mr. Black, but it’s true.”

Her smile, a cliche: the cat that ate the canary.

“But before I go,” she continues, “this is for you, Remus.” From the pocket of her robes she produces a folded piece of parchment, which she hands across the table.

“What’s this?” 

“Severus asked me to pass it along. He said that you’ve been trying to reach him.”

Remus only nods. “Thank you. Goodnight.”

She takes her leave, and before Sirius can joke about who or what her personal life might involve — catnip, he wants to say, or maybe Madam Hooch — Remus unfolds the note, pulling the edges of the parchment taut as he reads it. Sirius can’t make out Snape’s spindly handwriting without edging closer, but Remus’s expression — unreadable again — holds him at bay.

“Well?” he asks instead.

Remus folds the note into careful fourths and slides into his robes. “He’s coming tomorrow. He wants to talk to Draco.”

* * *

Another night passes in fits and starts, threaded with the condemnations of the dead. His best friend wishes for him to die, again and again and again. The poisonous words lick through his brain, pulse through his blood, until, at the edge of dawn, he staggers out of bed, his skull splitting, his hands fumbling for something to quiet the pain.

By the time Snape turns up, arriving mid-morning on his usual dark cloud, Sirius’s headache has sunk its roots through his jaw and down his shoulders, so he can only grimace when Snape drawls, “Black.” His white lips thin together. “I can smell the whisky on you from here — but I suppose you have nothing better to do while hiding with your tail between your legs.” Snape surveys the entryway with a cool, vaguely nauseated air, then pushes past Sirius, craning his neck to look up the staircase. “And where is Lupin? Typical that he’d be late.”

Miraculously, Sirius does not hex him where he stands. Nor does he tell him that Remus has been upstairs with Draco for the past half hour. He just pours what little energy he has into a frigid glare, while Snape glides through the doorway of the sitting room and settles into a chair.

“Well? I don’t have all day.” Snape lets his potions case rest at his feet before flicking a hand in dismissal. “Do tell Lupin that just because he no longer works for a living, the same can’t be said for everyone in the Order. Or, indeed, anyone else in the Order. But with you for company, I can see where the confusion arose.”

Sirius closes the door. Hard. His molars have begun to throb, and at the far end of the corridor, his mother’s portrait is screaming.

By the time he’s shut her up again and swallowed a few burning mouthfuls from his flask, Remus has appeared. Draco is not in tow.

Spotting Sirius, Remus sets his mouth at an apologetic angle. “He says he’d prefer to speak to Severus in private. I suppose I understand. He’s here?”

“Unfortunately.”

Sirius watches Remus’s hand rise through the air as if to touch his face, but there’s a pause, and then the weight of his hand lands on Sirius’s shoulder. “You look tired, Pads. You know, you needn’t be there for this. You don’t seem in the mood to be civil.”

“I’m not civil? That greasy bastard’s the one who — ”

The lifted eyebrows. The stoppered smile. Remus’s face, unmistakeable again, saying, _See?_  

It would be easy to agree. Sleep may not come, but another splash of liquor and an afternoon as Padfoot might ease him through the worst of it. But he can’t forget. He made a promise. “He’s my responsibility,” is the only explanation Sirius can give. He may not like Draco, the pinch-faced offspring of his pinch-faced cousin. Narcissa is cold and self-serving. Lucius was a pompous fascist. It doesn’t matter. He told Andromeda he would watch out for him, this sixteen-year-old boy whose head had been turned by the Dark Lord. Not the first sixteen year old of his sort Sirius has known.

This time, maybe, he can do something about it.

“He’s my family,” he says.

Remus squeezes his shoulder. “Of course.”

The sitting room has grown more comfortable under Order occupancy, thought it will never be what one would call cozy. The chairs, thinly cushioned, are ornately engraved, the legs textured as lace, the high backs carved into the stark shape of a raven, its beak curved as a scythe, talons sharp enough to draw blood. On the wall above the mantle, a portrait of a 17th century Black with deep-set eyes and red gums bares his teeth at him, muttering under his breath in barely intelligible French. The mirrored black surface of the tea table produces a shadowed twin of the three men who sit across from each other. In the reflection, the line of Sirius’s cheekbone gleams darkly, but his eyes are murky, and for a moment —  less than a moment — he thinks he sees something else. Someone else.

He blinks, and it’s only Snape’s reflection in the tabletop, frowning up at him. There’s something in his ugly face that is almost thoughtful.

Remus says, “Severus,” and Snape’s gaze snaps up, all insolent boredom again. “Thank you for coming. Can I get you anything? Tea?”

He looks down his large nose at Remus. “I hardly think I’ll be here long enough to warrant it.”

“I understand. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“I had thought that you would prefer to discuss matters with Draco here.” 

Remus steadies his hands on knees. The nails are bitten short. When had that happened? Sirius hadn’t noticed before. “There’s no need for that.”

“No? Perhaps you didn’t understand my note — ”

“I understood it quite well, thank you. But I believe we can sort matters out without him, for the moment.”

Snape inclines his head, just slightly. “I will still speak with him before I go.”

“Of course. Please, I insist you do. I’m afraid Draco hasn’t been in very good spirits since he’s come here. Not that I can blame him, of course — hard to imagine more terrible circumstances. But a visit from you might cheer him up a bit, I think. I seem to recall you always were his favorite professor.”

The prospect seems to disconcert Snape, but he nods again. Remus smiles.

“Now,” Snape says, snapping his potions bag open at his feet and pulling out another, smaller case. Brown, with a brass buckle and, inside, a week’s worth of large stoppered phials. It’s how he has delivered Wolfsbane to Remus these past months — the steady supply of which was one of the only conditions to Sirius’s offer of Grimmauld Place as Order headquarters. And Snape, for his part, has dutifully complied, so that Remus, when he disappears for days to run with wolves, at least walks into danger while in his right mind. “As I wrote, I will begin preparing a dose of Wolfsbane for Draco in time for the next full moon, but it’s far too late to brew one this month.”

Some weight sinks in Sirius’s chest, and Remus begins, “Could you find — ” but Snape says, “I don’t think so. I’m not without resources, but I could make no promises as to the quality of a potion I didn’t brew myself, and the possibility of drawing unwanted attention would not be negligible.”

“Yes, yes.” Remus’s fist, clenched his lap, releases all at once. Sirius hears him exhale, long and slow through his nose. “I was afraid you’d say that,” he says. “Best not to let anyone suspect you’re helping any werewolves.” His soft smile betrays nothing but serenity, but Sirius is uneasy. “I believe the solution is obvious. This is my dose for the month?”

They all glance at the case on the table. Sirius realizes at the same time as Snape.

“That would work,” says Snape.

“No,” says Sirius.

Remus does not look at him. “There’s no reason he couldn’t?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Good.” He’s still smiling. “Then there you have it. Draco takes the Wolfsbane this month, and I’ll manage things the old fashioned way.”

“No,” says Sirius again, and when they ignore him again, he says, “Moony, you can’t.”

Remus turns then, meeting his eyes. “Of course I can. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”

The coldness that Sirius finds in Remus’s face cannot be borne. The voices hum to life beneath his skin, enraged anew by the distaste flickering in Remus’s mild expression. He looks anywhere else. 

His eyes land on Snape.

“You,” he says. And all at once every ache in his head and every echo in his ears sings out in one discordant key, tuning themselves to the clear, bright note of his keen hatred. “You’ve been looking for an excuse, haven’t you, Snivellus? You think we don’t know you’re only following Dumbledore’s orders, helping Remus. Having a laugh now, aren’t you.” Sirius is the one who laughs, bitterly, as bitter, in fact, as the Wolfsbane he’s tasted on Remus’s lips. “Why didn’t you begin brewing the potion weeks ago, when you heard he’d been bitten?”

“Sirius.”

Remus’s hand, firm on his forearm. He shakes it off.

“You expect us to believe your Dark Lord didn’t tell you what he’d done? Maybe you were there when he planned it. Maybe you wanted things to turn out this way.”

“Sirius. Stop.” 

“No, do continue, Black. You’ve figured me out. I planned that a boy under my care be attacked by a rabid werewolf simply to ensure that your boyfriend has one bad night. Your intellect does astonish.”

Sirius leans in close across the table, still bearing his razor-edged grin, and, at this invasion, Snape at last flinches. “Tell me this, then, if it’s so absurd. Why didn’t you brew your favorite pupil Wolfsbane the moment you found out he’d been bitten? Why wait and take the chance?”

A powerful wrench of his shoulder pulls Sirius back into his seat, and his hip scrapes against the edge of the engraved raven’s talon. Remus holds his shoulder. His fingers dig into the bone.

Sirius keeps his eyes on Snape.

“You’re here for Draco,” says Remus. “I can take care of myself.”

 _You can’t take care of anyone_ , whispers James. His voice is smooth, honey-sweet. His voice is acid, unimaginable pain. _You couldn’t take care of me or Lily. You couldn’t take care of Harry. You let those vicious Muggles get their hands on him. You let Moony spend every full moon alone. You let Peter get away._  

“Just tell me why,” Sirius says. 

“Because,” says Snape. He straightens his spine. He lifts his chin. “Because when I heard what had happened, I didn’t believe it.”

Remus’s grip loosens a fraction. “That Draco was a werewolf?”

“No,” says Snape. “I didn’t believe that Draco was _alive_.”

Sirius tries to shake his head clear, considering this. “You thought he wouldn’t survive the bite?”

“I thought he wasn’t meant to survive the bite. I believed it to be a story meant to frighten those followers for whom the thought of their own child becoming a half-breed is more abhorrent than imprisonment or death. And I believed that, were Draco in trouble, Narcissa would call on me. When she didn’t, I feared they were dead. I hadn’t imagined she might turn to her sister.” 

“But she did. And Draco is alive.”

“Yes.” The word seems to cause him some discomfort. “And it makes no sense. The Dark Lord gains nothing by alienating Narcissa or even by cowing her into submission. She’s not Lucius — she has no standing in the Ministry, no influence on any Boards. Of course she has a place in society and a good name, but there are many Death Eaters who could say the same. If he wished to set an example, a punishment for Lucius’s failure, why not simply execute her and her son, rather than risk her defection or reprisals? He has never cared for the Malfoys. He has certainly never trusted them. Why bother to keep them alive?”

“Because,” Remus says slowly. His hand falls from Sirius’s shoulder. “No.” 

“Lupin’s caught the gist of it then.” Snape’s expression sours, if possible, even more. “Draco is alive and delivered into the Order’s hands, into Albus Dumbledore’s hands, because that is precisely where the Dark Lord wishes him to be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's stuck with this story despite my much-longer-than-anticipated hiatus. If you've followed me on tumblr (@katherinemansfields), you'll have seen me talk about this already, but I've spent the past several months applying to grad school and also struggling with severe depression, so writing just felt ... impossible. That said, I haven't forgotten this story and I hope to get back into regular updates. I can't promise a new chapter every two weeks but that's going to be my goal.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Draco's first full moon.

The first thing Draco can remember is this:

He is four years old. He is supposed to be asleep. But outside the trees shudder, thunder crashes, veins of light open up across the black sky. Malfoy Manor is impervious to the elements, unshakeable down to its foundations, but he doesn’t know this yet. All he knows is that when he looks out his bedroom window, the sky seems to be tearing itself apart.

And then his father is there, his big hand rubbing circles on Draco’s back, his voice barely audible over the sound of the storm, at least until he waves his wand and everything falls silent. Everything except the little bubble of protection of his arms.

He brushes the hair out of Draco’s eyes. He’s not smiling, he rarely smiles, but Draco can feel his love. ‘Just a storm, Draco,’ he says. ‘It’ll pass.’

This is what Draco remembers best, even now — the certainty in his father’s voice as he swore that the world was not crashing down around them.

* * *

Every morning Draco wakes in his cell in Grimmauld Place, fingers frozen and heart hard between his lungs. He never forgets where he is. He never forgets where he isn’t. He wants, more than anything, to go home, but home is a star too distant to spill even the palest of light. He no longer knows the way.

He rolls up his sleeve and looks at the thing on his arm. He eats the food the house elf brings him. He unpacks his trunk, then packs it again. He didn’t think to bring a photograph of his parents.

At night, when everyone has gone away, the sounds of their voices finally fading, he leaves his room. The house is a catacomb, all darkness and corridors, empty rooms overstuffed with dusty relics. The portraits watch him, narrowing their eyes in suspicion, and he stares back, wondering if he will see his mother, or one of his aunts, but these Blacks are all long-dead, and after the incident with Sirius Black’s mother, he is wary of getting too close to any of them. The last thing he needs is for Black and Lupin and the horrid old house elf to come running. Not if he’s to have any hope of contacting his mother.

The Floo is a dead-end — locked, guarded by magic he can’t untangle. At home the Floo has an emergency provision left over from Draco’s youth, when his magic was still untaught: a backdoor escape in case something went wrong and his parents weren’t there to help him. Back then he’d never thought to wonder what might go wrong. All he knew was that if there was trouble, he was supposed to find the potion nestled inside the grandfather clock nearest the drawing room fireplace; if he threw it to the flames, the Floo would drop its security for sixty seconds, enough time for him to flee. 

He hadn’t been able to make it there when Fenrir Greyback attacked. Had it even occurred to him to try? One moment he slept and the next — Greyback was there, Greyback was grinning, Greyback was _changing_. 

At any rate, Draco has checked every clock he’s come across, but there are no potions, no backdoors. And even if he can find some key, he doesn’t know where Dumbledore’s hidden his mother away. He could try Tonks House. Andromeda might be able to tell him something, he supposes, but of course she won’t. 

No, the answer lies with Professor Snape. He’s the only one left that Draco can trust.

It had hardly seemed real when Snape had stepped through Draco’s doorway, dour as ever, lips pursed as his gaze traveled once to Draco’s arm and then back to his face. Lupin had tried to tell him something about Snape, but Draco never imagined it was anything but another attempt to lure Draco from his room, and so he was caught off-guard by his professor’s arrival, lounging across the bed reading a smutty romance about a young Salazar Slytherin and the peasant witch with heaving bosoms who loved him. After half a second Snape’s presence registered, and Draco leapt to his feet. ‘Professor.’

‘Are you all right?’

Draco hastily threw his book to the side, then tried to work out what he could say. ‘I’m — ’ He shook his head.

‘And your mother?’

‘They won’t let me see her.’

Snape considered this for a moment before swooping into the hardback chair in the corner. ‘Sit down,’ he said, making a curt gesture, and Draco obeyed, settling back onto his hard mattress.

‘So it’s true,’ Draco finally managed. ‘I was sure Lupin was lying. But you really are a double-agent.’

Snape said nothing, and Draco, fidgeting with his bandage — now more aesthetically than medically necessary — steeled himself. There was a way out of this. There had to be. ‘But,’ he began, looking down at his own pale hands, ‘who are you really spying for?’ He glanced up again, but could not quite meet Snape’s eye. ‘Dumbledore or … ?’

Professor Snape’s mouth twitched, not exactly a smile, and his pale fingers spread over his black-clad knees. ‘Black and Lupin will be sticking their meddling noses in here any moment, no doubt,’ he said. ‘So we must be quick. There is much to discuss.’

* * *

He was gone within half an hour. At first Draco had hoped he might appear again the next day, or the next, but Professor Snape, he knows, will not return to Grimmauld Place before the month is out. Still, Draco does not forget all Snape has told him, and he certainly does not forget that it is Snape who brought him the Wolfsbane potion. It tastes awful, worse than the time Crabbe and Goyle tried their hand at baking spells, worse even than the bile that rises to his throat when he dreams of Fenrir Greyback, but it doesn’t matter. Even without Lupin fretting over him, he would drink every drop. He will not risk the consequences. He will do exactly as Professor Snape instructed. He will survive this full moon, just as he survived the last, just as he will survive the Order.

He tells himself it is what his father would want.

* * *

Early on the thirtieth of June, Draco wakes, his pulse thrumming beneath his skin, and writes a note for his mother, just in case. He thinks of nothing but Malfoy Manor and the long years before this, any of this, began. If he could find a way, he would go back, back before someone murdered his father, before the Dark Lord rose again, before he ever met that gangly freak Harry Potter. He would go back to being the center of his parents’ world, their great hope, their deepest joy. He would start again.

_I do not blame you, Mother. I know it was an impossible situation. I love you._

There is a soft knock at the door, and Draco carefully folds the parchment in quarters and slides it between the pages of _The Serpent’s Forbidden Kiss_. ‘Come in,’ he calls to the house elf. ‘I’m decent.’

But it is Remus Lupin who enters, breakfast tray balanced in hand, smile gone beyond bland into something transparently fake. He looks worse than usual, paler, more pinched, the circles nearly black beneath his eyes, and the sight of him makes Draco grimace. Merlin, is _this_ what’s in store for him if he survives? Hollowing out until he becomes nothing more than the mere shadow of a man?

‘I asked Kreacher if I might bring your tray up today. Well, Sirius told him to let me.’ He raises his eyebrows as if to communicate some joke, but Draco just frowns back at him. He does not really give one flying Firebolt who brings him food, as long as they don’t pester him — but it is clear that pestering him is precisely why Lupin is here. ‘At any rate … ’ In the face of Draco’s silence, Lupin barrels on, depositing the tray on the bedside table. ‘I thought it time that we talked about what you ought to expect tonight. I know how … how alarming the prospect of the first change can be.’

 _Alarming_. Draco knows he really means _frightening_. Or _terrifying_. Draco knows he is trying to pretend not to notice Draco’s fear.

Well, let him keep pretending.

Breakfast consists of the usual poached eggs and buttered toast, but there’s also a small hunk of dark chocolate beside the mug of tea. Draco eyes it warily. 

‘It always makes me feel better,’ Lupin explains. ‘Go on, eat. I know you aren’t feeling your best but you’ll be better off with a full stomach. I promise.’

‘You don’t have to act like everything’s going to be fine,’ Draco hears himself say, and then stuffs some toast in his mouth before he can say anything else. _I know it was an impossible situation_.

Lupin, his smile a little more genuine now, leans back against the door, his negligible weight sagging with exhaustion. ‘Everything _is_ going to be fine, Draco,’ he says. ‘Thanks to Professor Snape and the Wolfsbane potion, it will be. But I won’t lie and tell you everything’s going to be good. Do you mind if I sit?’

Draco, still chewing, says nothing, which is the only way he knows how to agree, and Lupin drops into the chair.

‘Now, where to begin? Interrupt me if you’ve got any questions, but let’s get the practical things out of the way. Tonight. Things should go very smoothly. No chains, no cages. Before Wolfsbane, it couldn’t be like that, but now there’s no need. You can stay in this room if you prefer, or if you’d rather a separate room for it, I understand that too. Whichever you pick, we’ll keep the door locked and Sirius will be watching out for you just in case anything, well, unexpected happens. But there’s no reason to believe that it will. No one brews a better Wolfsbane than Severus — you’re in good hands.’

‘How … ’ Draco busies himself stirring sugar into his tea. ‘How … will it feel? Will I know what’s happening or will I be some mindless dog?’

‘You’ll be you. You might be slower in certain ways, sharper in others, but nothing too alarming. I don’t know that I could read Shakespeare when I’m on Wolfsbane, but I do just fine curling up and having a good long rest. Thoughts are a little quieter, actually, when I’m the wolf — when I’ve had Wolfsbane, anyway. If you want, we can set out some food, too. I stopped by the butcher yesterday. But I know it can be disturbing to eat in that state, at least at first. You may not like it.’

Draco imagines a bloody slab of meat, and feels his stomach twist. He wonders if it’s disgust, or if he’s craving it already. If the werewolf only takes his body for one night, why does it takes days of potions to stave it off? Why does Lupin look halfway to death while the sun’s still high in the sky? Or is the change more gradual, something that takes place inside of him well before he starts to sprout hair and claws?

This, he knows, is the sort of thing he is supposed to ask Lupin, but the thought makes him sick. His sacked teacher — Harry Potter’s beloved professor. The man Draco’s father had spoken of with such contempt. 

It would’ve been better if Sirius Black was the werewolf. He’s a blood traitor, yes, but there is nothing pathetic about his aristocratic features and his dark moods. Merlin knows he wouldn’t try to pat Draco’s shoulder or ask about his feelings.

‘I’m afraid there is bad news.’

Draco laughs frostily. ‘Oh, was that all meant to be the good news?’

‘I’m sorry, of course not. I only mean, the Wolfsbane will make this easier for you than it would be otherwise. But it’s not perfect. Wolfsbane eases the transition but it doesn’t undo the fact that your entire body is being … ’ He lifts his hand as if to make some undoubtedly horrifying gesture and then seems to think better of it. ‘Reshaped,’ he says at last. ‘Draco, you will feel your bones breaking and muscles tearing. I am very sorry, but it will hurt, badly, and it will take you at least a few days to recover.’ He looks into Draco’s face. ‘Eat the chocolate.’

Draco doesn’t have any energy left to be clever so he shoves the chocolate in his mouth and rolls his eyes. It is bittersweet, softened from the heat of his tea, and it does make him feel better, a little.

Voice very careful, Lupin says, ‘Here’s the important thing. I know it sounds terrible, but when you start to change, try to stay calm. The Wolfsbane will help with that. Stay calm and accept that for a moment, something else has control of your body. Let go. The more you fight against it, the more likely you are to hurt yourself. Trust me. I know.’ He smiles another smile; it is somehow both real and without a hint of mirth, and Draco is startled again by how frail this old werewolf seems to be.

But alive, Draco thinks. His body has been torn apart and reassembled more times than Draco can begin to fathom, and somehow, frail as he is, it has not broken him yet. Not entirely.

‘How old were you?’ Draco asks.

Lupin seems surprised. ‘Just a boy. Not quite five.’

Draco tries to imagine Lupin a child of four, frightened and bleeding, more bite than boy. Did his mother try to heal him, as Draco’s did? Did she whisk him to St. Mungo’s and condemn him to a registry? But that was all decades ago. 

‘How did it happen?’

His face tightens. ‘I don’t know if — ’

Draco sneers. ‘Ah, so everyone here is entitled to their privacy except me?’

A few long seconds tick by, and Draco, aggressively slurping his tea (too much sugar), waits for Lupin to storm out. To leave him alone. But then he hears: ‘It was a punishment. For something my father had done.’ 

Lupin is gripping his own thigh, the heel of his hand pressing hard into the space just below his right hip, and Draco recognizes it at once for what it is. He sets his teacup down with a clatter. 

‘The werewolf who bit me,’ Lupin says. ‘It was Fenrir Greyback.’

There is a moment where Draco believes he will be able to keep his breakfast, but then the acid rises in his throat, flooding into his mouth. He can’t cover his mouth fast enough: there’s vomit on his sheets, vomit on his fingers, vomit on his chin.

By the time Draco has blinked back to focus, Lupin has sprung into action, vanishing the puddles of sick and hovering a hand over Draco’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’s saying, ‘I shouldn’t have been so — ’

Draco glares at him with wet eyes. He tries to find his voice to say, _No, you shouldn’t have, you idiot_. But his throat still feels raw and instead of saying anything he accepts the glass of cold water that Remus passes his way. He takes a few sips, carefully not thinking about Fenrir Greyback’s fanged mouth on his arm, the hot and bloody that tore into him. Draco does not think about how he wet himself, and how he cried, and most of all he does not imagine Greyback, thirty years younger, doing the same thing to a boy barely out of diapers, a boy as young as Draco was when he was still afraid of storms, let alone wolves in his bedroom.

Did Draco’s father know that this was how Lupin had become a werewolf? A ‘filthy half-breed’? Did it matter? Would it matter now, if he knew what had happened to Draco?

‘Draco.’ Lupin is still murmuring softly, guiltily. ‘I am so sorry this has happened to you, and I don’t blame you if you hate me and every werewolf in the whole world, but please know that I’m trying my best to ensure your safety. And you see now, I do know — a little bit — what you’re going through.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

Lupin sighs and stands up, turning his back to Draco, who can see the tension coiled through his whole skinny body. ‘I didn’t want to make your situation about me.’ He turns back around. ‘We’ve all got our own demons. You, me, Sirius too. Even Kreacher. These are dark times.’

Yes, that much is true. And it makes Draco think of something. ‘Potter will be here soon?’

‘Tomorrow evening. And I may as well warn you, the Weasleys will be here too, and Hermione arrives the next day.’

Whatever expression Draco makes must be easily readable, because Lupin says, ‘There’s no room for bad blood in this house.’ This strikes Draco as patently absurd — from the looks of this house, there’s room for little else — but Lupin adds, ‘Just be civil. We’ll tell them too.’

‘Civil.’

The tension in Lupin’s body somehow coils even tighter, and he scrubs a hand over his face. ‘I was your professor, Draco. I remember your behavior well. Please don’t do me the disservice of pretending to be something other than you are.’ He looks so tired that Draco wonders if he might be the one heaving his guts all over the room next, but he just clears his throat and says, ‘I am trying to do what I can for you, Draco. Please don’t antagonize the people I love.’

Typical, Draco thinks. It all comes back to protecting Potter, who’s had everyone eating out of his hand since the moment he appeared at Hogwarts. It all comes back to protecting the people who were there in the Department of Mysteries the night Draco’s father was murdered. _They_ are the ones who killed him. _They_ are the reason he’d failed the Dark Lord, the reason Draco must face hell tonight. He can never forget that.

‘One last thing,’ Lupin says once he’s halfway out the door. ‘I probably won’t be able to check on you tomorrow. I’ll be recovering too. I’ve asked Madam Pomfrey to stop by and see you, and of course Sirius and Kreacher will be able to help if you need anything. Oh — ’ He catches himself ‘ — and I’ll have Kreacher bring up some more food. Do try to eat what you can today. It _will_ help.’

Draco says nothing, the taste of sick still sour in his mouth.

* * *

That evening Draco downs his final dose of Wolfsbane and, despite the sandpapery feeling in his mouth, it tastes every bit as horrible as it did the day before. After that, his dinner has no flavor, and it seems no time has passed at all before Sirius Black arrives to ask if he’s ready.

‘I don’t want to do it here,’ Draco says, remembering what Lupin told him earlier. ‘And I _don’t_ want any food.’

Black rolls his eyes, but he motions with his hand for Draco to follow him. Draco leaves the note on his desk. It says: _For my mother, if anything goes wrong_.

‘We’re not lacking for rooms, at least,’ Black says as leads Draco through the corridors to another guest room — a large, interior room without windows, emptied of everything but a pile of folded blankets atop a large bare mattress. ‘Nothing for you to get yourself into trouble with in here,’ Black explains, and when Draco stares at him in confusion, he says, ‘Nothing to hurt yourself on.’

This is going to happen, Draco realizes. He is going to transform — his body is going to change in ways he cannot even begin to fathom. He’d watched Greyback do it, just one month ago. He’d gone to bed early that night, finding respite in sleep that he could not find elsewhere since his father’s death. And then, it couldn’t have been much later, twenty minutes, maybe thirty, he’d smelled Greyback. That was what woke him: the foul smell that he associated with the gardens of Malfoy Manor and Herbology classes, some mixture of mud and manure, and beneath that, a wet mustiness like the air at his father’s funeral, when it had only been him and his mother and the spitting of warm rain. By the time Draco understood what he was seeing — a _werewolf_ — it was too late, and soon everything smelled of blood.

The empty room tilts at him, and he catches himself against the wall. 

‘Look, Malfoy — Draco.’ Despite the whirring in his brain, Draco turns his head. Black looks smaller, suddenly, his handsomeness less sharp and fearsome. ‘I’ve seen Remus do this more times than I can count. You’ll be fine.’

‘You … ’ Draco remembers this now. He feels a little steadier. ‘You’re an Animagus.’

‘I am.’

‘You can be here while I … ’

‘I can. In fact, I will. Moony made me promise.’

Draco can’t help but protest. ‘I don’t _need_ — ’ 

‘I promised. And don’t think I wouldn’t rather be down there with him in the cellar, but he’s forbidden it.’

Of course no one here _wants_ to look after Draco. Not even his own blood. Like Snape said, they see him as leverage: something to be dealt with, not protected. Something to use against him mother. He won’t allow it.

With a defiant lift of his chin, Draco says, ’That mangy mutt doesn’t have to coddle me just because we’re … _bite brothers_. He’s got enough problems of his own, I should think.’

The danger sharpens in Black’s face as he narrows his eyes. ‘You don’t know the first thing about Remus, you brat. While you drink his Wolfsbane and monopolize his generosity — ’

‘ _His_ Wolfsbane? Professor Snape gave me — ’

‘He gave you Remus’s dose, because Remus asked him to. So tonight while I _coddle_ you, Remus will be locked up, tearing himself apart, so that you don’t have to go through anything like what he’s gone through.’ Black waits, then barks an unpleasant laugh. ‘Nothing to say? I thought so. It’s about showtime anyway. You’ll want to change out of your clothes if you don’t want them ruined. I’m sick of talking to you.’ 

With that, he transforms, but it is wholly different from Greyback’s shattering transformation. This is graceful, one fluid movement from man to dog, and it is like he’s never been anything else. There is no pain.

Draco, hiding his surprise and his embarrassment, turns his back to the dog and strips down to his pants. So Lupin — why didn’t he say? Why didn’t Snape tell him? Does it change anything?

He has enough time to register the guilty dip in his stomach before he feels the first, unendurable splintering, the first crack of his own unmaking, singing through his nerves.

* * *

Not for the first time, Draco awakes to a changed world, a world torn asunder, but this time it is not his father’s sturdy presence at his side, his father’s hand on his back: it is the madman Sirius Black, eyes cavernously dark and as cold as death itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise

**Author's Note:**

> Partially inspired by [this tumblr post](http://katherinemansfields.tumblr.com/post/124927268471/leradny-sexyferret-there-are-a-lot-of-harry).
> 
> Find me [here](http://katherinemansfields.tumblr.com) on tumblr! Feel free to come say hi.


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